Year: 2016

Thanks for supporting Cloudfix! The least we can do is write a introductory blog about their backup & replication solution for VMware. So this is not a full review of all the features of the product, but I hope it gives you a good glimpse of the product and I get’s you interested to do some further investigation into their products.

Besides a backup solution for VMware environments, NAKIVO is also offering a solution for backing up AWS-instances, so if you’re looking for a solution for backing up and recovering your company’s EC2 instances, please give their website www.nakivo.com a visit.

WOW! I think we just witnessed one of the biggest VMware-announcements we will remember for a long time this year at VMworld 2016. VMware is going to run a full vSphere SDDC-stack (vSphere / VSAN / NSX) bare-metal on AWS. Let me emphasize on this: It’s running BARE-METAL, so NO nested hypervisor. AWS will be running your workloads on the same vSphere-bits with the same feature sets, you learned to love on purpose-made, dedicated hardware available from all of their AZ’s (Availability Zones).

It gives you a easy way to extend your private on-premises DC to the AWS cloud and have uniform central management plane, leveraging vCenter Enhanced Linked Mode across all your (public & private) vCenter-servers. One of the coolest things which we witnessed was now really moving a VM from your on-premises and totally moving it to AWS with XvMotion-technologies

Besides bumping their virtualization-platform to version 6.5, VMware also added some new features to the SDS-solution in the new version of VSAN it announced. This quick article talks about the main new features which stood out according to us.

VSAN Version History

To give a idea what the main new features were in the previous releases of VSAN here, a short overview:

Version

Timeframe

Added features

VSAN (1.0) 5.5

March 2014

Inital Version

VSAN 6.0

March 2015

All-flash
64 Node cluster
2x Hybrid Speed

VSAN 6.1

September 2015

Stretched Cluster
Replication RPO of 5 minutes
2-node ROBO

VSAN 6.2

March 2016

Deduplication
Compression
QoS

We really enjoy the pace in which this product is being developed and in such a incredible pace. Keep it going guys!

The main new features for this 6.5 release which is announced during VMworld EMEA 2016 (Oktober 2016) according to us among others are:

Today VMware announced it’s latest version of the vSphere and vCenter platform, version 6.5. This article talks about some of the latest features VMware added to their virtualisation-platform.

vCenter Server (Appliance) 6.5

VMware is dramatically simplifying the experience using the vSphere-platform which is primarily based on the announcement of vCenter Server Applicance 6.5 and it’s new capabilities which are exclusive to the vCenter Server Appliance.

The VCSA-only features which are new to 6.5 are:

Native High Availability
Active/Passive HA solution with a witness for resolving split-brain situations. The setup requires 2 separate networks (Private vs. Public). The private network is used for HA (routed)-traffic between the both VSCA which consists of (sync) DB and (async) file-replication. This gives us a easy way to set-up a high available vCenter server.

(Integrated) VMware Update Manager
VMware Update Manager is now finally integral part of VCSA, so no more managing a seperate Windows VM for using VMware Update Manager.

Improved Appliance Management
Increased insight into how the appliance is doing CPU-, Memory-, Network- and databasewise. This reduces having to rely on the CLI for simple monitoring task on the VCSA and allows do this via the UI (VAMI). A thingy called vMon enhances the watchdog functionality which is also used for determing which host is active and which is passive when using VCSA in a HA-setup.

Native Backup & RestoreNative file-based backup & restore capabilities built-in to the VCSA, which allows backing up via HTTP(s)/FTP(s)/SCP protocols and restoring the state of a VCSA to a (fresh) appliance. All this happens from within the VAMI (Virtual Appliance Management Interface). It evens allows for restoring the configuration when installing the VCSA via ISO.

Questions

I am an IT enthusiast living in Enschede with my wife and 2 young kids. In my spare time I love to spend time with my family, friends, ride my motorcycle and road bike as often as possible.

After finishing school at age 20 I started working at several employers of which all are in IT. The first was at a local IT firm in the city I lived in at the time. Afterwards I worked at several larger businesses in the Arnhem and Utrecht area. Before starting at Equinix, I worked in the IT department of the hospital in Enschede as senior systems engineer.

Can you tell us something about your employer/company?

I work at the Managed Services department at Equinix. Equinix is the world largest suppliers of carrier neutral datacenters and operates 145+ datacenters across 5 continents in 40 metro areas. In The Netherlands, Equinix operates 10 datacenters of which 1 is currently being build.

The main business consists of housing, inter rack connections, inter metro area connections, inter country connections, direct public cloud connections (Equinix Cloud Exchange) and internet connections.

The Managed Services department designs, builds, operates and supports IaaS and PaaS platforms for customers inside our own datacenters. Besides building dedicated platforms according to customers specifications we also operate our own Equinix Business Cloud (EBC) IaaS platform, which is located in 3 datacenters across The Netherlands. Other products we sell are security & storage solutions and back-up & replication services.

Recently we came into contact with a company called Runecast to review their product called Runecast Analyzer. We quickly decided to do a quick review of the product and keep you updated how this product develops even further! We will also be paying them a visit on VMworld Barcelona to get some more details from the guys/girls themselves. So we will keep you updated!

Features

VMware KB Scan

Runecast analyzer is able to scan your vSphere environment for known issues described in KB articles from the VMware knowledgebase (kb.vmware.com), displays them in a table (sorted by severity) and allows you to copy this information or export this information easily for use in custom reports you might want to build from this information (note: in the version i’m using the PDF-export is showing a cut off PDF, but i’m sure this will be fixed in a feature release). The table allows you to dive deeper into the details of the KB and on which objects (vSphere Server, ESXi-host or VM) are affected by this issue.

As I am currently working on an Veeam implementation in a large Hyper-V environment, I decided to update my knowledge by following the Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE) Certification v9 training (Link) and subsequently take the exam to become certified. I also hoped to especially learn more about Veeam on Hyper-V, because my experience with that is very little in comparison with Veeam on VMware.

This short article gives a short overview of my VMCE experience, some tips on great information to pass the exam and some ramblings about what I think could be improved.

Questions

Who is Rutger Vossebeld?

I have started my IT career in 1995 configuring and building Novell 2.x, 3.x and 4.x networks, for a company in Boxtel with customers in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. After 2 years I decided to switch jobs and started at Sioux-CCM in Nuenen with a project to migrate the Novel 3.12 servers to a Windows NT4 environment.

Between 1997 and 2015 I have implemented several Microsoft server applications, VMware, Citrix, Juniper and Checkpoint solutions in our network infrastructure. In addition to server side applications I manage a PDM application Team center that maintains CAD data for the Siemens NX application which is used in at Sioux-CCM.

Can you tell us something about your employer/company?

CCM is a company founded in 1969 by Professor Alexandre Horowitz, and specialized in developing high tech mechatronic products and production systems for our customers. We are facilitated to complete an entire project, including design, realization and integration. This is done with about 100 employees in a village called Nuenen nearby Eindhoven.

Questions

Who is Mark Brookfield?

I’m an IT architect who’s been in IT for eighteen years. I’ve lived in the UK, the US, and currently I live in The Netherlands.

I don’t see what I do as “work” or “my job” – it’s something I do that people are kind enough to pay me for. I’m almost tempted to say I’d do my job for free, but I don’t want to give my boss any ideas…

Can you tell us something about your employer/company?

My current role is Technical Evangelist for NIU, a managed services provider in the UK. I report directly to the CTO and am tasked with finding new and innovative ways in which technology can make the business more successful. Fortunately, I’m not “hands-on” operational anymore, so I don’t break as much stuff 😉

NIU designs and builds solutions for a wide-range of clients, ranging from financial services to retail. We have approximately two hundred employees and our headquarters is in central London.

Recently I was busy scripting a Exchange migration (yes, i also do Microsoft besides VMware) in Powershell (Automating Cross-Forest moves from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013 and related tasks) for a customer of mine and got annoyed by the limited functionality Windows Powershell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment) is providing us by default,. I decided to look for a decent and affordable editor for Powershell. That’s when I stumbled upon ISESteroids (http://www.powertheshell.com/isesteroids2/).

ISESteroids

ISESteroids is a powershell module which adds all kind of handy functionality to the standard Windows Powershell ISE. Because I really liked it from the start I wanted to write a small blog article about it to share with you guys the 3 functionalities i like most and hope you find them just as useful as I do for writing Powershell scripts, functions and modules. For a total overview of the features of ISESteroids i’d like to point you to http://www.powertheshell.com/isesteroids2/feature-overview/